How to Get Android Notifications on Your Desktop

Notifications are one of the killer features of Android. They are essential to the OS, are deeply integrated with every app and system feature, incredibly powerful and allow you to know what’s going on without having to mess with an app, instead giving you all the info you need with a simple glance. So what could make it better? What about if you could get your notifications without even having to unlock your phone? That’s the premise of this tutorial, and if you’re interested, read on and you’ll have it set up in no time, for absolutely free! For this one, we will be using two things: the first is the Android app that will send your notifications to your desktop. The second is an extension for your browser of choice, Chrome or Firefox, where you will receive your notifications. So, let’s go ahead and set all of this up. I will be using Chrome for the purpose of illustration, but the process is exactly the same if you’re using Firefox, the only changes are mainly aesthetic in the extension.

So, the first thing you’ll need to do, as usual, is download the app. So, click this link to download the app and install it. After it’s installed, open the app. You’ll immediately see that there’s some stuff to enable first. So, go ahead and press the “Open Accessibility Settings” button. Now, under “Services”, enable Desktop Notifications. If the screen opens and then closes immediately after, instead of pressing the button on the app, go directly to the Settings app and then Accessibility. After enabling Desktop Notifications, you’ll see that the text below the button should turn green, letting you know they are enabled.

Now, let’s go to the next step. Like the apps says, now you’ll need to install a browser extension. The app lets you send an email to yourself so you can then download the extensions from your inbox directly on your computer, but you can directly click here for the Chrome extension or here for the Firefox extension instead if you don’t want to go through all that trouble. So, go ahead and pick the right one for your browser and install it. After installing it, you’ll now need to connect the app and the extension together. This is fairly easy to do, just click the extension icon on your browser and you’ll see some options. One of them is to insert a code, so go back to the app on your phone and look under the “Connect” section and you should see a bunch of characters. Type them into the code section and then “Apply”, and now the app and extension will be paired. You can test if everything is working alright by pressing the “Create Test Notification” button on the app. If everything is correct, you should see something like this popup in your browser:

And that’s about it for setting it up. The app is fairly in depth, and even allows you to enable and disable notifications on a per-app basis, so if there’s some app you don’t want getting notified on your desktop, just go into the app settings and uncheck it under the “Allowed Apps” section. There are also some more basic options, like only being enabled over WiFi that can come in handy if you’re on a mobile data budget. The extension also has a few basic options, like enabling a sound every time a notification is pushed and the time each notification should be allowed before disappearing, so if you want to change that just click the icon and adjust them as needed.

And that’s it for this tutorial. It’s very easy to set-up, and to be honest it’s sort of impressive that it works as well as it does. It’s kind of nice not having to look to my phone if the notification does not require it, and this can probably help your device catch some down time without you having to constantly check the content of every notification. It’s also cool if you’re only interested in a couple of notifications to show up on your desktop, like reminder apps or something like that, as this app can totally serve that purpose. I hope you enjoyed this one and that you’ll give it a try, remember as usual that you are free to let us know what you think about this in the comment section below!